Midwives in Transition: The Structure of a Clinical Revolution

The social construction of timetables for childbirth - how long normal labor and birth takes-by hospital and home-birth practitioners is compared to prove that, like all knowledge, this knowledge is socially determined and socially constructed, influenced both by ideology and social setting.

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of settings of practice on the construction and reconstruction of medical knowledge, specifically the development and uses of timetables for labor and birth. I reviewed the medical literature and interviewed 12 hospital-trained nurse-midwives who had begun to do home births. I argue that the medically managed hospital setting structures the birth process in social and ideological terms that are in many cases unrelated to the process itself.